Archive for the ‘Foreign Policy’ Category

During India’s first nine months on the Security Council, it has worked with the United States on broad themes but often differed on country-specific issues. Council membership has a price: many votes inevitably disappoint some of India’s constituencies and international friends.

September 15, 2011: For diplomats like us, there are few things worse than a highly touted bilateral summit meeting between two friendly national leaders that at the last minute fails to meet either the expectations of the summiteers themselves or the inflated hopes of their publics. These setbacks are not supposed to happen. According to the “diplomatic rule book,” basic agreements are worked out in advance by subordinate officials. These are then ratified by the leaders, perhaps with minor changes. If major outstanding problems are not ironed out before the summit begins, as sometimes happens, the two government try to limit expectations, not to encourage them.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s September 6-7 visit to Bangladesh is a case study of a summit whose preparation didn’t follow these rules. Read more

With more than a billion citizens, a thriving economy and a rapidly modernizing military, India is swiftly becoming a growing force in geopolitics. Teresita Schaffer explores the country’s complex relationships with its neighbors in Asia and the Persian Gulf and describes how the increased competitive pressures of its economy will force the United States to adapt.

June 21, 2011: Peter Burleigh is just arriving in Delhi for his second stint in less than three years as the U.S. chargé d’affaires during what is expected to be a long interregnum between ambassadors. This is a useful time to reflect on how ambassadors figure in the shaping of U.S.-India ties, and how well both countries are tending the diplomatic side of their emerging relationship.

In its dealings with the United States, Pakistan starts from the threat it perceives from India and emphasises India’s shortcomings. It will continue to use the United States as a balancer, barring a major improvement in India-Pakistan relations.

This excerpt from our book describes on the basis of our experience and extensive interviews how we believe Pakistan looks on India and on U.S.-India relations, and how Pakistan expresses these views in its dealings with the United States. It’s a perspective many will not agree with or welcome, but it affects how Pakistan deals with both India and the United States.

The U.S. and India are getting more interested in negotiations with the Afghan Taliban. Their evolving policies could benefit from closer U.S.-India consultations, and from back-channel India-Pakistan talks on Afghanistan.

April 1, 2011: “Cricket Diplomacy” was the buzzword of the week in India and Pakistan as the national teams of the two countries squared off in the World Cup semifinals at Mohali, a town in the Indian Punjab conveniently close to the Pakistani border. The Indian and Pakistani media have been crammed with commentary debating how this shared sporting enthusiasm they inherited from the British Raj could forward their recently revived bilateral dialogue. Much was made of the fact that Pakistan Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani had accepted Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s invitation to be his guest at the event.

Americans, most of whom find cricket as unfathomable as it is tedious, are likely to wonder what all the fuss was about. Even those of us who have spent long innings in cricket-addicted South Asian countries Read more

A review essay by Teresita C. Schaffer of four books about Indian foreign policy: Challenge and Strategy: Rethinking India’s Foreign Policy, by Rajiv Sikri; India’s Foreign Policy: The Democracy Dimension, by S.D. Muni; The Long View from Delhi: To Define the Indian Grand Strategy for Foreign Policy, by Raja Menon and Rajiv Kumar; and In the National Interest: A Strategic Foreign Policy for India, by Rajiv Kumar and Santosh Kumar.

A few elements are common to all these snapshots of India’s foreign policy. The first is India’s desire to dominate its immediate neighbourhood. How it interprets the requirement for continued primacy has changed, seen most notable in the conclusion that a regular American presence in the Indian Ocean serves India’s interests (a conclusion Sikri might question). But whether or not an author places the troubled relationship with Pakistan at the top of India’s foreign-policy challenges, in all four studies, India’s determination to retain great-power status in South Asia is not open to serious question.

Originally published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in the December 2010-January 2011 issue of Survival. Read the entire essay.

The Working Group on an Expanded Nonproliferation System, headed by Teresita Schaffer and Joan Rohlfing, President of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, issued a statement June 30, 2010 recommending that India and the United States declare their intention to work together to bring India into the four export control groups that form part of the nonproliferation system. They argued that this would strengthen the nonproliferation system, and that it would give India the opportunity it seeks to be part of the management of this system rather than an object of its controls.

The statement was originally appeared on the CSIS and NTI web sites. To read it in full, go to Statement.